Well they are better than the collect 20 bear claws quests where apparently not every bear has claws. So you spend an age fighting bears, or trolls or whatever random creature you have to collect a thing from.

If the quest gives the same amount of xp/a little lower than a quest with a battle/multiple battles, I personally think it's great simply because it's easy xp! For an example of time, why wouldn't you want to do a retrieval quest that gives you 2000xp that takes 1 minute over a quest that gives the same amount of xp that has a battle, and takes 10 minutes to complete?